The Shrinking World Inside You: What's Happening to Our Gut Microbes

A live talk on the gut microbiome and the future of health Your gut is home to trillions of living things. Together they form an ecosystem as rich as a rainforest, and they do far more than digest your lunch. But modern life is putting this ecosystem under pressure. Ultra-processed foods, more C-section births, and other everyday changes are quietly wiping out microbes we depend on. What does that mean for your health? And can we turn it around? The Gut Foundation is bringing one of the world's most influential microbiome scientists to Christchurch for one night. Rob Knight has spent his career mapping the invisible world inside us. He built the tools microbiome scientists everywhere now rely on, his TED talk has been watched more than two million times, and he was named 2025 Scientist of the Year by the ARCS Foundation. He's also done something no one had tried before: he convinced tens of thousands of everyday people to mail him their poo. Through the world's largest citizen-science gut project, he unlocked insights that changed microbiome research forever. In this talk, he'll share what those volunteers helped reveal, why your own gut is worth paying attention to, and how new tools could soon turn a simple sample into advice you can really use. The microbiome is the future of health. Get ahead of it. In a few years, understanding your gut could be as normal as knowing your blood pressure. The science is moving fast, and it's about to change how we think about food, medicine, mental health, and disease. But right now the conversation is drowning in noise. Detox teas, miracle supplements, "gut-healing" everything. Most of it isn't science, it's marketing. This is your chance to skip the fads and hear where things are actually heading, straight from one of the people building the future. Come and meet the microbes that make you, you.